The national polls are showing Trump closing the gap with Biden, but the former vice president still has a strong and clear lead. Today’s FiveThirtyEight polling average has Biden +7.0, down from +7.5. This could be due to statistical noise, undecided Republicans coming home to Trump, recency bias related to a number of mediocre pollsters with results, or some combination of the above. I think it is all three, but the undecided Trump supporters coming home makes the most sense to me as the strongest driver. There is little evidence right now that any narrowing of the race comes at the expense of Biden’s support. But, most polls had a good 8-10% undecided earlier in the year and we are starting to see that disappear as voting begins.
There is something else that suggests that the national race is not really tightening - at least not at the cost of Biden votes. And that is today’s state polling. Take a look at this table from FiveThirtyEight:
We are seeing support dropping for Trump in the aftermath of a couple of weeks of several serious unforced errors. Florida has been closing to even in recent weeks, but Monmouth (A+) shows Biden with a clear lead there. CNN/SSRS (B/C) finds a big lead for Biden in Wisconsin and clear, but closer, lead in North Carolina. Morning Consult (B/C) has it closer for Minnesota than we have seen recently, but still a clear lead for Biden.
It’s easy to get concerned about voting margins when we look at state polls, especially when we hear so much about how Biden needs five percent nationally to ensure an Electoral College victory. (It doesn’t ensure it as much as vastly increase his chances, and Biden can still win the EC with a smaller margin.) But, in the states it is winner take all. The winner of the popular vote in a state, even if by one vote, wins the state. So, a three point lead in an important battleground state is more reassuring than the same lead nationally.
The margins in the table above are not close. Obama beat Romney in 2012 by four points. It was no landslide, but that race was not close, regardless of the way it was reported (many in the media want to make it a horse race every year; keep that in mind). Obama won five million more votes than Romney and captured 332 electoral votes. While many people do not understand probabilities and thus can get fooled by the chances forecasters give a candidate to win the election, many also seem to think that a single digit margin in an election is a close outcome (it’s not).
A close election is one that the outcome may be in question; that it’s plausible that the votes were miscounted and the other candidate actually won. Think of it this way: one percent of the electorate in 2016 was 1.38 million votes. And here’s a pro tip for counting votes: never will all of the outstanding votes go just one way. If you remember the night of Election Day 2012, Karl Rove took issue with the Fox News data team (who are really good) because they called Ohio for Obama, effectively declaring him reelected. Rove insisted there was enough votes outstanding to tip the state to Romney. And he was right - but only if those votes came in at 90-10 for Romney. Maybe that could happen in some counties in North Dakota or Idaho, but not Ohio.
If Biden can hold his support, Trump is not going to catch him. In most years, I would be more concerned about any Democratic nominee losing support as the campaign drags on, but the polling thus far shows that voters who are supporting one of the candidates are largely unpersuadable this year. Something like 90+% of respondents who support Biden and Trump say that they will not change their minds; that’s still enough to have an impact on the outcome. However, as Larry Sabato has noted, there are probably really only five percent of voters that are undecided and half of them will likely not end voting. The wild card this year - aside from voter suppression activity, which happens every year from the GOP but is an even bigger part of how they hope to win this year - is the pandemic. We don’t know how that is going to impact the overall pool of actual voters this year (which is what pollsters are trying to estimate by using “likely voter” samples - or LV in the table).
Remember, these state polls today are just snapshots. We have to keep looking at trends and averages. However, in light of recent polling and handwringing by some Democrats, today’s state polls are very encouraging for Team Biden.